DIY Desk Space: Bushwick's Market Hotel Now Offers Daytime Coworking

As Brooklyn's DIY scene continually evolves, Myrtle-Broadway's storied Market Hotel is trying out something new: during the day, local freelancers can pay a membership fee to have access to the space for coworking.

Market Hotel first served as a venue and practice space in the late aughts when it was home to squatters. It reopened to much fanfare last year as a professionalized nonprofit event space that put on a packed calendar of heralded, sold-out shows before a tangle with the law in October prompted management to move the venue's upcoming shows and rethink the space's business model until the organization obtained a full liquor license.

Events at Market Hotel in the past few months have included community-minded, non-boozy programming such as a a free, all-ages "drum arcade" and several vegan pop-up markets. Management has also found some creative ways to pay the rent for the space: in November, the big-budget CBS show "Bull" filmed in the space.

Coworking would certainly provide a stable source of monthly income for Market Hotel while its other plans are pending, and management has made sure it can offer a deal worth the rates they have established (part-time access to the space three days a week costs $195 and full-time access to the space is $245, which is competitive pricing on the Brooklyn coworking scene, judging by the numbers in this 2016 survey of local coworking options).

Members can drink complementary coffee and tea in house and store their equipment in lockers at Market Hotel; there's a printer, copier and scanner as well as fiber optic 350-mega-byte-per-second internet available on site. There are private rooms available for meetings and taking phone calls, and members can receive mail at Market Hotel, as well as using it as an address for other official purposes.

It's also an inclusive workspace: it's wheelchair-accessible, it has daytime bike storage space, and it's animal-friendly.

The space will operate as a coworking facility 11 hours a day from 8 a.m. until 7 p.m. for the foreseeable future—coworking space coordinator Sonia de Jager tells Bushwick Daily that when the space starts operating as a venue for shows, management plans to continue offering coworking space.

There are also plans in the works to host lectures, talks and benefits in the space in the evenings. De Jager, who describes her general line of work as curatorial and philosophical, is looking forward to working on developing the evening event schedule at the space.

Will Market Hotel be the home of a new collaborative digital art initiative, or a socially-minded startup? Time will tell; the space can accommodate as many as 40 members, and anyone is welcome to apply, though de Jager tells Bushwick Daily that "If you're a sound engineer, we'd expect you to wear headphones, of course."

"For the rest, there are no restrictions whatsoever. Clearly though, given the venue's reputation and appeal we imagine that the audience we'd be pleasing is rather creative, artistic or musical—generally speaking; the same crowd who would visit the shows at night," de Jager elaborates.

The space remains a nonprofit, and de Jager characterizes the financial plan as "a cradle-to-cradle loop which covers the operational costs, if we are able to get enough members!"

Interested parties can email broadway myrtle[@]gmail.com for additional information and to sign up for a space.